“ Original edition of Gobineau’s major work, rare and increasingly sought aftere ” (Clouzot)
printed in 500 copies in 1855 at the author’s expense.
Superb copy en binding of the period.
From the library B. Loliée.
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Count of. Essay on the Inequality of Human Races.
Paris, Firmin Didot Frères, 1853-1855.
4 volumes in-8 of I/ (2) ff., xi pp., (1) p., 492 pp., (1) f. errata; II/ (2) ff., 512 pp., (1) f. errata; III/ (2) ff., 423 pp., (1) p.; IV/ (2) ff., 359 pp., (1) p. Dark blue half-morocco with corners, gilt fillet, spines with raised bands decorated with gilt and blind fillets. Binding of the period.
225 x 139 mm.
“ Original edition of Gobineau’s major work, rare and increasingly sought aftere” (Clouzot).
Clouzot, 133; Carteret, I, 345; P.M.M., 335; In French in the text, 271.
“ This essay by Gobineau is little more than novelized science but it is marked by genius” (Dictionary of Works).
From the very first words of his work, Gobineau indicates his intent: “The fall of civilizations is the most striking and at the same time the most obscure of all the phenomena in history”.
“ When he publishes between 1853 and 1855 ‘the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races’, this Gascon diplomat perhaps composed the last romantic epic. Based on vast erudition, the essay strives to articulate race and individual, nature and culture, origin and end of humanity. The Essay is less a scholarly work than a kind of novel of origins that challenges many of the century’s prejudices while trying to uncover the mechanics of history, without resorting to conventional religious or political arguments” (Pierre Glaudes).
“The French Diplomatist and man of letters, Gobineau (1816-1882), has, through the ‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’- his one excursion into the realms of anthropology and sociology –exerted an influence upon European thought and action which is quite disproportionate to its scholarly insignificance and inconsequential argumentation. The men of the Action Française, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler were, at one remove, the disciples and propagandists of Gobineau’s most outrageous ideas. Gobineau’s racial theories were based on a complete misunderstanding of the positivism of Comte and the researches of Prichard into the physiological differences of the various human races. Fortified by the innate arrogance of a scion of an ancien régime family and by his observations as an envoy in the Near and Middle East, he championed the theory, since entirely disproved, that ‘race’ is a permanent and immutable phenomenon, and he proclaimed the unchallengeable superiority of the white race over all others. Within the white race, Gobineau assigned the supreme position to the ‘Nordic’- or as he fatuously called them ‘Aryan’- peoples who, thanks to their praiseworthy qualities of hardiness and lust for power, are predestined to rule the rest of mankind. There was enough substance in Gobineau’s book to provide nourishment for the growth of the pan-Germanism and national self-adulation, and seemingly to justify anti-Semitic and anti-Slav excesses. Hence derived the ‘superman’ and the glorious ‘blond beast’ of Nietzsche and the Germanomania and anti-semitism of Wagner.” (PMM).
Very beautiful copy preserved in its elegant period binding.
